X-ray prohibited item detection is an essential component of security check and categories of prohibited item are continuously increasing in accordance with the latest laws. Previous works all focus on close-set scenarios, which can only recognize known categories used for training and often require time-consuming as well as labor-intensive annotations when learning novel categories, resulting in limited real-world applications. Although the success of vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) provides a new perspectives for open-set X-ray prohibited item detection, directly applying CLIP to X-ray domain leads to a sharp performance drop due to domain shift between X-ray data and general data used for pre-training CLIP. To address aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we introduce distillation-based open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) task into X-ray security inspection domain by extending CLIP to learn visual representations in our specific X-ray domain, aiming to detect novel prohibited item categories beyond base categories on which the detector is trained. Specifically, we propose X-ray feature adapter and apply it to CLIP within OVOD framework to develop OVXD model. X-ray feature adapter containing three adapter submodules of bottleneck architecture, which is simple but can efficiently integrate new knowledge of X-ray domain with original knowledge, further bridge domain gap and promote alignment between X-ray images and textual concepts. Extensive experiments conducted on PIXray and PIDray datasets demonstrate that proposed method performs favorably against other baseline OVOD methods in detecting novel categories in X-ray scenario. It outperforms previous best result by 15.2 AP50 and 1.5 AP50 on PIXray and PIDray with achieving 21.0 AP50 and 27.8 AP50 respectively.
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